VII.

The Water-Drops.

A FAIRY TALE.

I.

THE SUITORS OF CIRRHA, AND THE YOUNG LADY; WITH A REFERENCE TO HER PAPA.

FAR in the west there is a land mountainous, and bright of hue, wherein the rivers run with liquid light; the soil is all of yellow gold; the grass and foliage are of resplendent crimson; where the atmosphere is partly of a soft green tint, and partly azure. Sometimes on summer evenings we see this land, and then, because our ignorance must refer all things that we see, to something that we know, we say it is a mass of clouds made beautiful by sunset colors. We account for it by principles of Meteorology. The fact has been omitted from the works of Kaemtz or Daniell; but, notwithstanding this neglect, it is well known in many nurseries, that the bright land we speak of, is a world inhabited by fairies. Few among fairies take more interest in man’s affairs than the good Cloud Country People; this truth is established by the story I am now about to tell.

Not long ago there were great revels held one evening in the palace of King Cumulus, the monarch of the western country. Cirrha, the daughter of the king, was to elect her future husband from a multitude of suitors. Cirrha was a maiden delicate and pure, with a skin white as unfallen snow; but colder than the snow her heart had seemed to all who sought for her affections. When Cirrha floated gracefully and slowly through her father’s hall, many a little cloud would start up presently to tread where she had trodden. The winds also pursued her; and even men looked up admiringly whenever she stepped forth into their sky. To be sure they called her Mackerel and Cat’s Tail, just as they call her father Ball of Cotton; for the race of man is a coarse race, and calling bad names appears to be a great part of its business here below.

Before the revels were concluded, the King ordered a quiet little wind to run among the guests, and bid them all come close to him and to his daughter. Then he spoke to them as follows:—

“Worthy friends! there are among you many suitors to my daughter Cirrha, who is pledged this evening to choose a husband. She bids me tell you that she loves you all; but since it is desirable that this our royal house be strengthened by a fit alliance with some foreign power, she has resolved to take as husband one of those guests who have come hither from the principality of Nimbus.” Now, Nimbus is that country, not seldom visible from some parts of our earth, which we have called the Rain-Cloud. “The subjects of the Prince of Nimbus,” Cumulus continued, “are a dark race, it is true, but they are famed for their beneficence.”

Two winds, at this point, raised between themselves a great disturbance, so that there arose a universal cry that somebody should turn them out. With much trouble they were driven out from the assembly; thereupon, quite mad with jealousy and disappointment, they went howling off to sea, where they played pool-billiards with a fleet of ships, and so forgot their sorrow.

King Cumulus resumed his speech, and said that he was addressing himself, now, especially to those of his good friends who came from Nimbus. “To-night, let them retire to rest, and early the next morning let each of them go down to Earth; whichever of them should be found on their return to have been engaged below in the most useful service to the race of man, that son of Nimbus should be Cirrha’s husband.”

Cumulus, having said this, put a white nightcap on his head, which was the signal for a general retirement. The golden ground of his dominions was covered for the night, as well as the crimson trees, with cotton. So the whole kingdom was put properly to bed. Late in the night the moon got up, and threw over King Cumulus a silver counterpane.

II.

THE ADVENTURES OF NEBULUS AND NUBIS.

The suitors of the Princess Cirrha, who returned to Nimbus, were a-foot quite early the next morning, and petitioned their good-natured Prince to waft them over London. They had agreed among themselves, that by descending there, where men were densely congregated, they should have a greater chance of doing service to the human race. Therefore the Rain-Cloud floated over the great City of the World, and, as it passed at sundry points, the suitors came down upon rain-drops to perform their destined labor. Where each might happen to alight depended almost wholly upon accident; so that their adventures were but little better than a lottery for Cirrha’s hand. One, who had been the most magniloquent among them all, fell with his pride upon the patched umbrella of an early breakfast woman, and from thence was shaken off into a puddle. He was splashed up presently, mingled with soil, upon the corduroys of a laborer, who stopped for breakfast on his way to work. From thence, evaporating, he returned crest-fallen to the Land of Clouds.

Among the suitors there were two kind-hearted fairies, Nebulus and Nubis, closely bound by friendship to each other. While they were in conversation, Nebulus, who suddenly observed that they were passing over some unhappy region, dropped, with a hope that he might bless it. Nubis passed on, and presently alighted on the surface of the Thames.

The district which had wounded the kind heart of Nebulus was in a part of Bermondsey, called Jacob’s Island. The fairy fell into a ditch; out of this, however, he was taken by a woman, who carried him to her own home, among other ditch-water, within a pail. Nebulus abandoned himself to complete despair, for what claim could he now establish on the hand of Cirrha? The miserable plight of the poor fairy we may gather from a description given by a son of man of the sad place to which he had descended. “In this Island may be seen, at any time of the day, women dipping water, with pails attached by ropes to the backs of the houses, from a foul fetid ditch, its banks coated with a compound of mud and filth, and strewed with offal and carrion; the water to be used for every purpose, culinary ones not excepted; although close to the place whence it is drawn, filth and refuse of various kinds are plentifully showered into it from the outhouses of the wooden houses overhanging its current, or rather slow and sluggish stream; their posts or supporters rotten, decayed, and in many instances broken, and the filth dropping into the water, to be seen by any passer by. During the summer, crowds of boys bathe in the putrid ditches, where they must come in contact with abominations highly injurious.”[1]

So Nebulus was carried in a pail out of the ditch to a poor woman’s home, and put into a battered saucepan with some other water. Thence, after boiling, he was poured into an earthen tea-pot over some stuff of wretched flavor, said to be tea. Now, thought the fairy, after all, I may give pleasure at the breakfast of these wretched people. He pictured to himself a scene of love as preface to a day of squalid toil, but he experienced a second disappointment. The woman took him to another room of which the atmosphere was noisome; there he saw that he was destined for the comfort of a man and his two children, prostrate upon the floor beneath a heap of rags. These three were sick; the woman swore at them, and Nebulus shrunk down into the bottom of the tea-pot. Even the thirst of fever could not tolerate too much of its contents, so Nebulus, after a little time, was carried out and thrown into a heap of filth upon the gutter.

Nubis, in the meantime, had commenced his day with hope of a more fortunate career. On falling first into the Thames he had been much annoyed by various pollutions, and been surprised to find, on kissing a few neighbor drops, that their lips tasted inky. This was caused, they said, by chalk pervading the whole river in the proportion of sixteen grains to the gallon. That was what made their water inky to the taste of those who were accustomed to much purer draughts. “It makes,” they explained, “our river-water hard, according to man’s phrase; so hard as to entail on multitudes who use it, some disease, with much expense and trouble.”

“But all the mud and filth,” said Nubis, “surely no man drinks that?”

“No,” laughed the River-Drops, “not all of it. Much of the water used in London passes through filters, and a filter suffers no mud or any impurity to pass, except what is dissolved. The chalk is dissolved, and there is filth and putrid gas dissolved.”

“That is a bad business,” said Nubis, who already felt his own drops exercising that absorbent power for which water is so famous, and incorporating in their substance matters that the Rain-Cloud never knew.

Presently Nubis found himself entangled in a current, by which he was sucked through a long pipe into a meeting of Water-Drops, all summoned from the Thames. He himself passed through a filter, was received into a reservoir, and, having asked the way of friendly neighbors, worked for himself with small delay a passage through the mainpipe into London.

Bewildered by his long, dark journey underground, Nubia at length saw light, and presently dashed forth out of a tap into a pitcher. He saw that there was fixed under the tap a water-butt, but into this he did not fall. A crowd of women holding pitchers, saucepans, pails, were chattering and screaming over him, and the anxiety of all appeared to be to catch the water as it ran out of the tap, before it came into the tub or cistern. Nubis rejoiced that his good fortune brought him to a district in which it might become his privilege to bless the poor, and his eye sparkled as his mistress, with many rests upon the way, carried her pitcher and a heavy pail upstairs. She placed both vessels, full of water, underneath her bed, and then went out again for more, carrying a basin and a fish-kettle. Nubis pitied the poor creature, heartily wishing that he could have poured out of a tap into the room itself to save the time and labor of his mistress.

The pitcher wherein the good fairy lurked, remained under the bed through the remainder of that day, and during the next night, the room being, for the whole time, closely tenanted. Long before morning, Nubis felt that his own drops and all the water near him had lost their delightful coolness, and had been busily absorbing smells and vapors from the close apartment. In the morning, when the husband dipped a teacup in the pitcher, Nubis readily ran into it, glad to escape from his unwholesome prison. The man putting the water to his lips, found it so warm and repulsive, that, in a pet, he flung it from the window, and it fell into the water-butt beneath.

The water-butt was of the common sort, described thus by a member of the human race:—“Generally speaking, the wood becomes decomposed and covered with fungi; and indeed, I can best describe their condition by terming them filthy.” This water-butt was placed under the same shed with a neglected cesspool, from which the water—ever absorbing—had absorbed pollution. It contained a kitten among other trifles. “How many people have to drink out of this butt?” asked Nubis. “Really I cannot tell you,” said a neighbor Drop. “Once I was in a butt in Bethnal Green, twenty-one inches across, and a foot deep, which was to supply forty-eight families.[2] People store for themselves, and when they know how dirty these tubs are, they should not use them.” “But the labor of dragging water home, the impossibility of taking home abundance, the pollution of keeping it in dwelling-rooms and under beds.” “Oh, yes,” said the other Drop; “all very true. Besides, our water is not of a sort to keep. In this tub there is quite a microscopic vegetable garden, so I heard a doctor say who yesterday came hither with a party to inspect the district. One of them said he had a still used only for distilling water, and that one day, by chance, the bottoms of a series of distillations boiled to dryness. Thereupon, the dry mass became heated to the decomposing point, and sent abroad a stench plain to the dullest nose as the peculiar stench of decomposed organic matter. It infected, he said, the produce of many distillations afterwards.”[3] “I tell you what,” said Nubis, “water may come down into this town innocent enough, but it’s no easy matter for it to remain good among so many causes of corruption. Heigho!” Then he began to dream of Princess Cirrha and the worthy Prince of Nimbus, until he was aroused by a great tumult. It was an uproar caused by drunken men. “Why are those men so?” said Nubis to his friend. “I don’t know,” said the Water-Drop, “but I saw many people in that way last night, and I have seen them so at Bethnal Green.” A woman pulled her husband by, with loud reproaches for his visits to the beer-shop. “Why,” cried the man, with a great oath, “where would you have me go for drink?” Then, with another oath, he kicked the water-butt in passing—“You would not have me to go there!” All the bystanders laughed approvingly, and Nubis bade adieu to his ambition for the hand of Cirrha.